HR.com

The #1 online community of practice for HR Professionals

Canadian entrepreneur Debbie McGrath started HR.com in 1999 with the vision to support HR executives all over the world in their daily business. Originally designed as an online magazine the portal was continuously expanded to provide a wide variety of HR information and to give executives the opportunity to communicate with their colleagues worldwide via different channels. The community so far constists of 250,000 registrated users who are actively exchanging best practises, contributing content and sharing contacts/networks all enabled by SITEFORUM.

Requirements

After six years of developing their own platform HR.com spent 2 years looking for software which would provide a successful extension of their business and meet all the demands of a modern Web 2.0 site. Debbie McGrath explains: "Our core business was not developing technology but building community, content and networks. We needed to partner with a technology firm whose core competency was building technology to support communities. It became evident, that we need a powerful and flexible software platform to manage and further expand our portal and keep us up to date with the latest Web 2.0 trends like social networking, blogging, and viral networking.

Solutions

The standard SITEFORUM product was a perfect fit for the HR.com business. In addition to the powerful publishing capabilities, the web 2.0 functions of HR.com enable members to create and update their member profiles, join online communities on different HR issues, participate in webcasts, member polls, rate content, network with other members, create groups and participate in surveys or discussion forums. As Debbie McGrath says. "For us this means that we provide information from various sources in a personalised or topic-related way to our members."

Results

Using the SITEFORUM Search Engine Optimization (SEO) module has increased the number of visitors on HR.com by 40 per cent. Up to 130,000 personalized emails are sent daily and page impressions were raised to 7.4 Mio. in 2009. The website had 8000 visitors per day in 2009.

Debbie McGrath sees a huge advantage in using SITEFORUM as software-as-a-service: "The costs and manpower that is required to implement and run this platform are so small, that a company of any size can use this technology. In addition, we do not need to worry about the next upgrade, how it interfaces, if we need more hardware back ups and bandwidth. It is all SITEFORUM's business.Our experience has been wonderful. The SITEFORUM platform enables us to further develop our vision of a worldwide leading HR community and gives us the guarantee to always have the right technology in place for an attractive pricing."